28 | January 2019
Air quality instrumentation: A history
By David Pariseau
A
ir quality monitoring is rela-
tively new in the commercial
space and we've seen a num-
ber of issues and concerns
that are remarkably similar to
those we faced in the early
days of air quality monitoring
in the industrial space.
This article provides a brief history of the de-
velopments of air quality instrumentation in the
cleanroom space. It appears that we're at the
beginning of similar developments for air quality
instrumentation within the commercial space. In
fact, we're already seeing many of the key players
in indoor/outdoor air quality raising many of these
same issues today.
For the purposes of this article I'll only dis-
cuss particulate monitoring, since it's what I'm
most familiar with but similar issues exist with
gas sensors, and other environmental sensors
to some degree.
Particle counting as an industry was born largely to ad-
dress yield problems in semiconductor manufacturing. The
